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Perception

Figure-ground illusion

What I am looking at here?

This picture of the man in the moon is blurred because I took it on a lurching train
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What I am looking at here?

This picture of the man in the moon is blurred because I took it on a lurching train

When we look at any visual object, we need to distinguish between the thing we should be looking at (the figure), and the background.

Sometimes the background can itself form a figure, and it is impossible to see both figures at once. The face-vase illusion is a classic example – your brain switches between seeing two white faces and seeing a black urn or vase. But you can’t see both at the same time.

The classic faces-vase illusion

A practical implication of this applied to typography, is that people cannot read both styles at the same time. Try comparing these football teams:

The Gestalt psychologists were interested in how we distinguish shapes and edges from among visual phenomena. Detecting objects is basic to human perception, and is early to develop in infants. In seeking to make sense of the world, we make probabilistic guesses about what we are looking at, which we check against the rest of the image, and our own experience of visual objects. 

How this helps
If you switch between white as figure and white as ground, be aware people may not read both. If you do this in headings, you can repeat what the heading says in the paragraph beneath it.
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